Recent Movie Viewings

I really haven't posted about my movie viewings in a while! Well, I've seen quite a few over the past month or so. Namely: Fearless, Andrei Rublev, Paheli, Match Point, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Dreamer. Some of them were good, some not so good.

Let's start with The Good:

Fearless- Jet Li's latest and perhaps last martial arts movie is really, really good. It's quite earnest, very upfront and unsubtle in delivering it's anti-violence and patriotic messages but it's immensely likeable and has some of the best fight scenes in Jet Li's career. Even better, the man actually delivers a kick-ass performance, in and out of his fight scenes. The movie is a very fictionalized version of Huo Yuan Jia, a legendary though very real martial arts master who founded the Jing Wu Athletic Federation and is perhaps most famous for defeating foreign challengers in a time where the Western world was trying to stereotype the Chinese people as the "sick men of Asia." The movie strays pretty far from the man's real life story, but that very deviation allows it to create a gripping, dramatically effective story. In seeking to expound it's theme of wushu as a means of self-realisation, the movie moves through 3 acts.

In the first, Huo Yuan Jia is an arrogant, hard-drinking young man who fights for pleasure and glory and thinks nothing of breaking the bones of an opponent. There's a fight scene in this section which by itself is worth the price of admission- an amazingly brutal, violent battle between a drunken Huo and a Master Qin, who he has just insulted. The fight starts off at the top floor of a beautiful tea house set and makes it's way down to the basement of this building, leaving nothing but destruction in it's wake. Jet Li and his opponent succeed in creating a sense of raw power and fury that's so palpable, it's frightening. It's one of the best-choreographed fights in the movie and at a certain point, it felt like I was watching a battle between angry gods. It was just that intense. At the same time, I felt bad watching the fight because it was obvious nothing good could, or would come out of it.

True enough, BAD THINGS HAPPEN following this fight, and Huo spends the next few years of his life in exile, getting back to nature and rediscovering his soul. This part of the movie has a pseudo-love story that doesn't quite go anywhere and some silly moments involving farmers who all do a Titanic "King Of The World" impression (without actually yelling out the words) whenever wind blows. But it still works to establish the change in Huo's character and leads up to the final act of the movie- where Huo kicks all kinds of foreign ass and becomes the hero of the Chinese people. The fight scenes here do a really good job in depicting how much Huo's character has changed- the bone-cracking violence of the first half of the film is replaced by graceful, almost balletic moves and a primarily defensive style that turns opponents attacks back on them. The first fight scene in this act, against a British boxer named Hercules O'Brien, was particularly cool. It's no secret that Huo died soon after founding his martial arts federation, but the movie buts a very dramatic spin on the events of his death. Even though I knew he was gonna kick the bucket, I still felt really sad when it happened.

So there you have it, a Jet Li movie with the requisite amount of ass-kickery and an emotional storyline to boot! Solid stuff. Though I'd like to see the extended cut of the movie (which apparently had Michelle Yeoh as a character). What's with Hong Kong movies getting cut to bits these days? Granted, this movie was coherent even with the cuts, unlike Seven Swords, but still! Trust the audiences a bit lah!

Andrei Rublev- The Singapore Film Society screened this movie by famed Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky last month and me and my friend Jacky were there to see it! It's a hard movie to watch as it leaves a lot up to the viewers and doesn't bother to explain itself, but it's a bonafide masterpiece of cinema and perhaps one of the few movies I can call a genuine work of art. It's ostensibly a biography of the medieval Russian Icon painter Andrei Rublev, but it doesn't follow a conventional story structure or anything that simple. What it does, and does beautifully, is question the role of art in a world where virtue, beauty and love seem all but forgotten and war and suffering seem to be omnipresent. I challenge any lover of cinema to watch the final sequence in the movie and not be inspired and deeply moved.

UPDATE: Paheli- I totally forgot about this one! Mostly because I saw it on TV and not in a cinema- it was showing on Central a few weeks ago. Me and my mom caught it and thoroughly enjoyed it. The story, a sort of supernatural village fable, is different from the usual Hindi movie fare and quite delightful. Shah Rukh Khan and Rani Mukherjee have great chemistry and predictably enough, turn in great performances. Nice appearance by Amitabh and the twist ending is rather cute.

The Not So Good:

Match Point- Woody Allen's latest work seems to be, on the surface, quite different from his previous offerings. It's no comedy, for one thing (though it has a few comedic moments). But in the way it looks at the tangled web of human relationships, and the way love and lust can alternately invigorate and destroy lives, it treads very similar territory to previous Woody Allen movies- particularly Crimes and Misdemeanors. The plotting is smart and the visuals very pretty (if rather cliched- the movie is set in a tourist's London, complete with a scene set to the backdrop of the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace) and the operatic soundtrack gorgeous. The best part of the movie is Scarlett Johansen, who's grown more beautiful with every movie she's acted in and is just ravisingly gorgeous in this one.

With all that goodness, why didn't I enjoy the movie more? Well, the movie is bloody misogynistic, that's why! The three main female characters in this movie are a) a bitchy mother, b) an over-bearing, nagging wife and c) a femme-fatale who turns into a clingy, shrieking harpy. Granted, the main character is not exactly likeable himself (in fact, not many of the characters are), but Woody Allen continues to demonstrate a failure to depict women in a realistic or nuanced way at all. I'm still looking forward to his next film, though, if only because it'll star Scarlett again. Yep, I'll watch anything with her in it.

Memoirs of a Geisha- Shakespeare's phrase, "full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing," just about sums it up. Even rather heartfelt performances by leads Zhang Zhiyi, Michelle Yeoh and Gong Li couldn't save this movie. It's beautiful but ultimately soulless. A far cry from Chicago, this.

The Bad:

The Dreamer- A friend of mine convinced me to watch this movie, claiming it would be good. Well, it was quite possibly the most boring movie I've seen in the past 2 years. It's about a little girl, played by Dakota Fanning and her dad, played by Kurt Russell (what happened to you man? You used to be THE MAN!), who live on a horse ranch with no horses and decide to buy a horse with a broken leg, nurse it back to health and try to win a big race with it. It's based on a true story. The horse wins, of course. That's it. The movie is so mediocre there's just nothing to say. If you want to see a good movie about a horse, go see Seabiscuit.

Edited: 30 October 2006 (added list of movie titles to the first paragraph).